Source: Thinkstock
Wall Street: a place where money is thrown around as if it’s meaningless. It’s a place where fortunes are made and lost, and where daily screaming matches over the future prices of soy beans take precedent over almost everything else. Investors throw around capital, dictating tectonic shifts in the economy and policy. Yes, Wall Street is a magical place where honest men and women can go to put their money to work.
But it’s also a place that attracts those of questionable character. With so much money flying around, coupled with paltry amounts of oversight and regulation, the idea of cutting corners here and there can become wildly attractive. There have been hundreds if not thousands of Wall Street criminals over the years, their misdeeds ranging from simple insider trading to massive Ponzi schemes, perpetrated over several years. The recent financial crisis also saw its genesis on Wall Street, where only a handful of white collar criminals were able to bring the entire country to its knees.
There have been books written and movies made about some of the more high-profile activities, including The Wolf of Wall Street, Wall Street, and Boiler Room. As these adaptations of real life events have entertained audiences through the years, the real-life effects of those they chronicle still affect many people to this day. With the recent financial crisis, the Libor scandal, and book-cooking, there’s so much drama that it would be hard not to bring these stories to the big screen.
Here we take a look at ten of the more notorious Wall Street criminals of all time. Their crimes range in magnitude and severity, and some are noteworthy simply because of who perpetrated them. Some names are well-known, others will be new to most people. But they all have one thing in common: they used the markets to game the system.
Read on to see ten of the biggest Wall Street busts of all time.
1. Albert H. Wiggin
Albert H. Wiggin is not a household name, but as the one of the original godfathers of fraud, he should be. Wiggin enjoyed a successful career as the head of Chase National Bank, now JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM). Originally joining the bank in 1904, he oversaw the bank’s expansion during the early 1900s, building it into one of the nation’s leading financial institutions. He oversaw mergers with seven other banks, and increased Chase’s assets from $250 million to $2.7 billion, according to the Harvard Business School.
Unfortunately, Wiggin also became the posterboy for public ire following the market crash in 1929. It was revealed that he had shorted his own company 40,000 shares, which, as Investopedia puts it, is similar to a boxer placing a bet on his opponent to win. He profited immensely to the tune of $4 million (quite a lot for that time), and wasn’t even guilty of breaking any laws. In the years following, there were laws put into place to stop such behavior. In 1934 the Wiggins Act was passed, placing stiff penalties on insider trading.
Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/home_of_chaos/
2. Bernie Madoff
No name has become more synonymous with fraud and financial shenanigans than Bernie Madoff. A former stockbroker and investment advisor, Madoff pulled off the largest financial fraud in U.S. history through a Ponzi scheme that totaled roughly $65 billion. Arrested in 2008 at the age of 70, Madoff was put in handcuffs one day after he came clean to his sons about his company’s trickery, and his sons went to authorities with the information. He eventually pleaded guilty to eleven federal felony counts, and was sentenced to the maximum sentence of 150 years in prison.
The Madoff trial ended in 2009, but defendants are still pleading guilty to this day. The effects of the scheme hit Madoff’s family especially hard as well, as his son would later commit suicide. Financial victims of the Ponzi scheme include celebrities like Kevin Bacon, Steven Spielberg, and John Malkovich. Considering the enormity of the Madoff scheme as a whole, he could count himself as lucky that he will only be spending a relatively small portion of his century and a half jail sentence behind bars, as time is sure to catch up with him sooner or later.
Source: Getty Images
3. Bruno Iksil
In what was made famous as the ‘London Whale’ trading scandal, JPMorgan Chase incurred big losses through trades at its London location, with total losses at approximately $6.2 billion. The losses were traced back to trader Bruno Iksil, who essentially had been gambling on transactions through a series of credit default swaps, which ended up backfiring and losing the company billions. Iksil’s hedging strategy to increase profits lead to a cover-up and subsequent investigation by the U.S. government.
The bank eventually agreed to pay a fine of $920 million to settle charges relating to the scandal, and two of Iksil’s coworkers were hit with criminal charges. The bets Iksil and his ilk placed were in an abstract and obscure subset of the market, making them relatively unknown or detectable by many. JPMorgan Chase was forced to actually admit that they had broken the law by the SEC, which is unusual for a financial institution, on top of paying the large fine and incurring huge losses. It only goes to show that a whale is never safe from a stiff harpooning by regulatory commissions.
4. Jordan Belfort
Belfort, most well-known for being portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in last year’s film The Wolf of Wall Street, is a former stockbroker who has since become an author and motivational speaker. Martin Scorsese profiled several of Belfort’s reckless exploits in his film, which included manipulating the stock market as part of a penny stock scam. Belfort founded the brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont, which went on to defraud investors through sales of stock while employing more than 1,000 people. The firm was shuttered in 1998, and Belfort was charged with money laundering and fraud.
After an FBI investigation, and Belfort’s agreement to cooperate, he went to jail for almost two years. The total damage in investor losses was tallied at $200 million, $110 million of which Belfort was ordered to pay back by the courts. After being released from federal prison, Belfort authored his memoir, which was the basis for Scorsese’s movie. He also makes the rounds on the speaking circuit, and now calls Southern California home.
Source: United States Marshals Service
5. Allen Stanford
It’s not easy to earn a 110-year federal prison sentence, but Allen Stanford was able to pull it off. The Texas-born Stanford was, at one point, one of the richest men in America with a net worth of roughly $2.2 billion. Sadly, that wealth was accumulated by running a Ponzi scheme, much in the same vein as Bernie Madoff. Reports indicate that investors had complained about Stanford’s crimes as far back as 1997, but the SEC didn’t actually go after him until 12 years later during the financial crisis.
In 2009, he was charged with fraud by the SEC for crimes that involved around $7 billion. Prior to his arrest, he voluntarily surrendered to authorities after several raids on his offices across the country. In addition to his 110-year sentence, he was ordered to forfeit $5.9 billion as part of his civil penalty. Stanford never admitted to wrongdoing, and instead blamed his company’s misdeeds on government regulators. His earliest possible release from prison will be in the year 2105.
Source: United States Marshals Service
6. Jeff Skilling
Little more needs to be said about Jeff Skilling than that he was the CEO of Enron Corp. — but just in case the details of this particularly horrid case of corporate fraud escape you at the moment, here’s an executive summary.
Enron was a major energy company with a major positions not only in the electricity and natural gas markets, but also with operations in communications and even paper and pulp businesses. At its peak, the company employed about 20,000 people and claimed revenues of over $100 billion. The company was apparently so successful that Fortune named it the America’s most innovative company six years in a row, from 1996 until 2001, when the scandal broke.
Claimed is the operative term here when it comes to Enron’s business, because in 2001 it came to light that Enron had been conducting institutional fraud. Through a series of accounting loopholes and a mind-boggling amount of complacency, corruption, and incompetence, Enron booked billions in fake revenues and hid billions more in debt over several years. The fraud that Enron committed was both institutional and complex, but it boils down to the fact that Enron claimed revenues that it had no real right to claim.
But the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Enron’s bankruptcy was the biggest in American history, and it was so catastrophic that it even put its auditor, Arthur Andersen, out of business. Skilling is currently serving a 14-year prison sentence, begun in 2006.
Source: Thinkstock
7. Ivan Boesky
Remember the “greed is good” speech from the movie Wall Street? Here’s a taste, in case you missed it: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.”
The speech, and the film itself, is incredible, but Oliver Stone didn’t just pull it out of thin air the same way that Guillermo del Toro threaded together Pan’s Labyrinth. That speech was given by Gordon Gekko, a fictional corporate raider who epitomized the leveraged buyout mania of the 1980s and who was inspired by very real corporate raiders and money managers most famous for their bad behavior.
Ivan Boesky was exactly the kind of white-collar criminal we presume Gekko was inspired by. The son of immigrants, Boesky utilized a mix of hard work and dubious morality to become one of the most successful money managers on Wall Street during the 1970s and 1980s. Partnering with the infamous Michael Milken aka the “Junk Bond King,” Boesky used insider information to make his millions. At one point, Boesky’s fund was managing $3 billion. With a hefty 50 percent fee, Boesky quickly became one of the richest people in America.
His fortunes changed in the late 1980s when regulators began cracking down on Wall Street, and particularly those involved in the generally value destroying leveraged buyout industry. As Business Insider chronicles, authorities first went for Milken and then came after Boesky.
Boesky (to his credit, we guess) cooperated with authorities and opened the lid on the can of worms that was Wall Street’s LBO sector at the time. Boesky helped federal investigators break up a massive insider trading ring which resulted in charges filed against 14 people at five major brokerages. In 1987, Boesky was sentenced to three years in prison, but served just 22 months for good behavior.
Source: Flickr, Michael Solita
8. Barry Minkow
Barry Minkow was a criminal from an early age, and the habit would bring him as much fame and fortune as it would grief and, ultimately, jail time. Minkow first made a name for himself in the late 1980s when he was caught operating one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history. His fraud cost investors about $100 million — not as bad as Madoff, but still big enough and, in many ways, textbook enough that it is used as a case study.
Financial regulators caught up with Minkow in 1988. He and his staff at ZZZZ Best (seriously, that’s the name of the company he used, pronounced “zee best” — he came up with the name in high school) were indicted on 54 counts ranging from racketeering to tax evasion. Minkow was sentenced to 25 years, but was released early in 1995.
During his time in prison, Minkow appeared to undergo a classic though insane kind of turnaround. Born to a Jewish family, Minkow became a born again Christian shortly before going to prison, and when he emerged he went to work as a pastor. According to U-T San Diego, Minkow then proceeded to bust other Ponzi schemes operating in the area near his church, including one that had defrauded investors out of $300 million. Minkow’s cooperation helped convince a judge to end his probation in 2002.
But Minkow hadn’t really turned himself around. In 2011, Minkow issued a report accusing the homebuilder Lennar Corp. (NYSE:LEN) of fraud. It turns out, though, that Minkow had either fabricated or exaggerated most, if not all, of the claims he made. Still, his report caused shares to tumble and Minkow tried to game the market by taking a short position on the stock. That year he pleaded guilty to a count of insider trading and was sentenced to five years in prison — and in 2014, he was sentenced to five more years for fraud related to his time as a pastor.
9. Martha Stewart
By now, Martha Steward is as famous for her insider trading scandal as for her successful commercialization of lifestyle, now tied up relatively neatly as the business Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (NYSE:MSO) — that’s right, a publicly traded company. It’s not a company to write off, either. Martha Steward Living Omnimedia pulled in more than $160 million in revenue in 2013, although it did take an operating loss of about $1.9 million.
But getting back to the insider trading bit, Stewart was always more than just the face the brand, she was also the business mind behind it. As a successful businesswoman, Stewart owned sizable positions in fairly speculative equities, as you would expect most moguls would. One of her positions was in a biopharmaceutical company called ImClone Systems, now owned by Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE:LLY).
To make a not-so-long and actually kind of boring story short and punchy: Stewart sold the nearly 4,000 shares she owned in the company after receiving an insider tip from her broker. The timing of the sale helped her avoid tens of thousands of dollars in losses, as the stock tanked the day after the trade was made. Stewart was ultimately sentenced to five months in prison.
Source: U.S. National Communications System
10. Bernard Ebbers
Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek aptly captured the spirit of infamous WorldCom Chief Executive Bernard Ebbers when they framed the man as the “telecom cowboy” in a 1997 issue. That year, Ebbers made himself famous by orchestrating the unsolicited and unprecedented $40 billion takeover of MCI, a telecommunications company now owned by Verizon (NYSE:VZ).
WorldCom became famous under Ebbers’ leadership for its aggressive acquisitions campaign. WorldCom gorged on smaller telecom companies until it finally ran up against one it couldn’t absorb, Sprint (NYSE:S), which it still tried to purchase for $129 billion in 1999. Regulators shot down the deal over antitrust concerns. The following year, as the tech bubble began to collapse and much of the telecom industry went with it, WorldCom started to deflate. WorldCom itself was discovered to be artificially inflating revenues and falsely claiming normal expenses as capital expenditures, while Ebbers used company loans to protect himself from margin calls on his own leveraged equity positions. All told, WorldCom had artificially inflated assets to the tune of $11 billion.
Ebbers was convicted of fraud in 2005 and is currently serving a 25-year sentence.
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